Last Things

Dedication

For Ryan

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

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Acknowledgments

About the Author

Books by Jacqueline West

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Copyright

About the Publisher

Thea

I like the edges.

Places where things end. Fade out. Disappear. Where two things eat away at each other until neither of them really exists anymore. Sharp edges. Frayed edges. Places that are more than one thing, or nothing. It’s more comfortable at the edge. No one really pays attention to you if that’s where you live, or stand, or eat your lunch.

Most people don’t even notice that you’re watching them.

On Friday nights I go to the Crow’s Nest. Everyone goes to the Crow’s Nest. All the kids from high school, all the bored twentysomethings, all the coffee drinkers and scruffy artists and metal fans within a fifty-mile radius. Last Things plays on Friday nights. There’s not much else to do in Greenwood, even on a Friday night. And Last Things is special. They’d be special anywhere.

In a town like Greenwood, they’re legendary.

The Crow’s Nest Coffeehouse is out of town, down a twisty road that leads back to the river, if you’re not in a hurry to get there. The woods lean in around it. They lean farther and farther. They drop acorns and send out reaching suckers. They’ll get this spot back eventually. They’ll take everything.

The Crow’s Nest is an old farmhouse with the innards ripped out. The interior is just one huge room, with a stage at the back and a coffee bar at the front. The walls are so coated with stickers and posters and ragged-edged artwork that there’s no telling what they’re made of, or what color they used to be. Part of one outer wall has been replaced by a row of glass doors, so the room leads straight out onto a weathered porch, and from there to an overgrown patio full of mismatched tables and junkyard statues and climbing vines and chipped bathtub planters full of dirt and whatever kinds of flowers survive on a decade of tough love.

On nights when Last Things plays, the place is packed.

Guys in T-shirts and leather, girls in black. A blur of tattoos on exposed skin. Piercings. Heavy boots. Thick makeup. Clumps of soft-faced freshmen, out past their usual curfews, whispering about music. Every table taken. The floor in front of the stage already occupied by rows of the most hard-core fans.

Sometimes I take a table at the edge of the patio. There’s one behind a potted juniper that has a clear view of the stage. If that spot’s taken, I pick a seat in back, at the very end of the coffee bar, where Ike and Janos are busy at the espresso grinder or drizzling sickly caramel syrup into the lattes the other girls order.